Read my lips - Advances in speechreading research with deaf children

11 May 2013

Speechreading is the term used by
researchers to refer to lipreading. ‘Speechreading’ is preferred to
‘lipreading’ because lots of information is used from all of the face, not just
the lips, when you watch someone speak. For deaf people, this can be their
primary route to speech information. Hearing people also make great use of
visual speech, although they often don’t realize it. If you think of talking to
someone in a noisy bar, a hearing person is much more likely to understand a
person if they can be seen. This is where the old joke ‘I can’t hear you
without my glasses on’ comes from.

DCAL researchers have
previously developed a Test of Adult Speechreading (TAS; Mohammed et al., 2006). This computerised
test was specially designed for deaf adults and did not require any reading or
writing responses, unlike many previous tests. Deaf adults (18-60yr olds)
performed better than hearing adults on this test. In addition, how well deaf
people performed on the speechreading test was correlated with their reading
skill.

Now, DCAL researchers have developed a similar test for
children: the Test of Child Speechreading (ToCS). A total of 86 deaf and 91
hearing children were tested aged between 5 and 14 years. Children were
assessed at different levels: single words, sentences and connected speech. The
researchers found that unlike adults, deaf and hearing children had similar
levels of speechreading skill. This pattern suggests either a decrease in
speechreading skill in hearing children after the age of 14 years relative to
deaf children, or, more likely – that as deaf people get older and go through
adolescence and into early adulthood – their speechreading skills improve with
greater practice and reliance on visual speech, relative to hearing
people. Further research is needed on
the age group not yet tested by the TAS and the ToCS (14-18 year olds) to find
out what happens to speechreading skills in this stage of development.

The research with children also demonstrated, just like the
adult data, that there was a positive correlation between speechreading and
reading skill. This was found not only in deaf children, but interestingly,
also in hearing children.

Further research is planned by the team to further examine
the relationship between speechreading and reading in deaf children.

A copy of the research – to be published in the Journal of
Speech, Language and Hearing Research - can be requested from Dr Mairéad
MacSweeney.